Shopping Barrow-style

Shopping is alive and well in the frigid fray of the far north. The nearest mall may be 500 miles to the south, and the locals may be just two or three generations into their cash economy having traded communal living and the barter system only mid-way through the last century, but we are still Americans up here, and we shop.

Ok, so Layla and I don't really shop. The screen door look of my best pair of socks and the T-shirt I'm wearing that reads "Bahamas 94-95" atest to that. But we live in a place with only one major store and a handful of dry goods and auto parts stores. A gallon of milk is nine dollars, a quart of oil (the one brand they have) is $6.50 and the entire clothes department of the Stuaqpak ("Big Store" in Inupiaq) would fit into the toddler section at a Fred Meyers store down south.

Sure, the internet and eBay were godsends to shoppers everywhere, but ask a true department store diva anywhere and they'll tell you that it's not the same as a day convincing friends to take another armful of the latest fashion into the room full of mirrors or haggling with a merchant over the difference in price of a few more pieces of funny money foreign currency that you can't even remember what it represents in dollars.

That's why shopping is likened to sport. There's something about the unknown outcome of seeing what's new and what's on sale, about the reality of touching the real thing or using every shred of savvy and thread of experience to walk away with a bargain that makes shopping such a draw for so many people--even in a place so remote that UPS won't even touch it.

This weekend though, we got a firsthand and in depth proof that the shopping life is powerful enough to overcome any remoteness, any lack of storefronts or display cases, and any lack of a place to go show off your new purchases. We had a rummage sale. The term itself is amazingly accurate. When it's 10 below outside and every yard in town is covered in wind-packed snow, or soggy tundra in the summer, a "yard sale" wouldn't attract too many customers. Even a "garage sale" sounds pretty darn cold.

Rummage, on the other hand, describes perfectly both what you find and what you do to find it at a Barrow rummage sale. As a noun, it means miscellaneous articles; odds and ends, and from all we had heard from a few seasoned Barrow shoppers, nothing is to odd, to miscellaneous or too much at the end of its useable life to make it to a table at an arctic rummage sale. The extra rolls of toilet paper, hotel soaps, and a can of sweet peas didn't draw as much as a pause. In fact, they sold.

The verb form of rummage, to search thoroughly or actively through (a place, receptacle, etc.), esp. by moving around, turning over, or looking through contents, also applied. As neatly as we tried to lay everything out, after the first wave of early rummagers came through (some things are very much the same here as anywhere) everyone else was going to have to rummage as well to find their bargains.

And the rummaging didn't stop with the things designated for sale. Because this form of arctic shopping takes place in your home, you might find an offer on anything from the framed family photo to the appliances or anything else not bolted down. Then again, I bet going to get the tool box wouldn't be out of the question even if something was bolted down. Despite offers on not-for-sale items like the microwave (just because everyone else sells theirs...), the rugs and our laptop computer, and multiple offers on the coffee table, we managed to hang on to what we wanted and to get rid of most of what we didn't.

Waves of shoppers would come through the door--mostly small groups of women or women with kids or a patient husband in tow. I'm not sure if it was after payday, if the village or regional corporation checks had just come out or what, but we often felt like we were the only people dealing with real money. "What's that?...I'll take it!" We felt like we priced things fairly, but with the excitement in the air and the old film cameras, bars of hotel soap and even Luke's crib flying out the door, we wondered if we had sold ourselves a bit short.

One woman in a purple parka paid in ones for her rummage. "This is my rummage sale money. All week I save all my little bills for the rummage sales on the weekends." That's when we realized that it wasn't about the noun rummage, but about the verb. Just like at malls and shopping districts world-wide, there was the social element. Mothers, sisters, daughters and nieces, along with the occassional father, brother, husband or son, would drive from one sale to the next. Most would buy things for people who weren't with them, and many seemed happy just to see the inside of a new house.

For Layla, shopping means spending hours online researching the best solution to our need and the best deals for that solution. For me, it means getting the quickest solution that works well enough to not have to keep looking for a better one. So we were both a bit out of our element with the social shoppers of Barrow who cycled through the house with cash in hand, kids in tow and bags of our rummage on the way out. I guess with such a limited selection in town of new goods and new places to shop for them, even the veteran rummage sale items take on a new glow of excitement in a new house on a new Saturday morning.

When it was all over, we had sold almost everything we wanted to, including our car, and I felt a great feeling of lightness without the wieght of our rummage to pack, unpack and stack when we get to Juneau. I also felt for the first time a touch of understanding for what I'm realizing must be a universal American pasttime--shopping.